‘Everything about the A-12 Oxcart program was dark alley, cloak, and dagger. Even the way they financed the operation was highly unconventional,’ Ben Rich, second Director of Lockheed’s Skunk Works
As a replacement for the U-2 spy plane, the CIA created the highly classified A-12 Oxcart with the goal of providing the country with a very fast, extremely high-flying reconnaissance aircraft capable of avoiding Soviet air defenses. Lockheed, the company that built the U-2, was given the Oxcart contract by the CIA in 1959.
Under the direction of renowned engineer Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, Lockheed overcame many technical obstacles to meet the A-12’s extreme speed and altitude requirements. These included innovations in titanium fabrication, lubricants, jet engines, fuel, navigation, flight control, electronic countermeasures, radar stealthiness, and pilot life-support systems.
The A-12 was declared fully operational in 1965 following hundreds of hours of flight at high risk by an elite team of CIA and Lockheed test pilots. The aircraft had achieved the design goal of maintaining a sustained speed of Mach 3.2 at an altitude of 90,000 feet.
In his book “Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed,” Ben Rich—the second Director of Lockheed’s Skunk Works from 1975 to 1991, following its founder, Kelly Johnson—recalls an intriguing detail about how the CIA funded the A-12 Oxcart program.
‘Everything about this project was a dark alley, cloak, and dagger. Even the way they financed the operation was highly unconventional: using secret contingency funds, they back-doored payment to Lockheed by writing personal checks to Kelly [Johnson*] for more than a million bucks as start-up costs. The checks arrived by regular mail at his Encino home, which had to be the wildest government payout in history. Johnson could have absconded with the dough and taken off on a one-way ticket to Tahiti. He banked the funds through a phony company called “C & J Engineering,” the “C & J” standing for Clarence Johnson. Even our drawings bore the logo “C & J”—the word “Lockheed” never appeared. We used a mail drop out at Sunland, a remote locale in the San Fernando Valley, for suppliers to send us parts. The local postmaster got curious about all the crates and boxes piling up in his bins and looked up “C & J” in the phone book and, of course, found nothing. So, he decided to have one of his inspectors follow our unmarked van as it traveled back to Burbank. Our security people nabbed him just outside the plant and had him signing national security secrecy forms until he pleaded writer’s cramp.”
*According to Kelly Johnson’s book Kelly: More Than My Share of It All, he became known as ‘Kelly’ Johnson (his full name being Clarence Leonard Johnson) because, while attending grade school in Michigan, he was ridiculed for his name, Clarence. Some boys started calling him “Clara”. One morning, while waiting in line to get into a classroom, one boy started with the normal routine of calling him “Clara”. Johnson tripped him so hard that the boy broke a leg. The boys then decided that he was not a “Clara” after all, and started calling him “Kelly”. The nickname came from the popular song at the time, “Has Anyone Here Seen Kelly? (Kelly from the Emerald Isle)”. Henceforth, he was always known as “Kelly” Johnson.
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Photo by U.S. Air Force
